52 I'THcRc IS A HOST APPROACHING NIGH" T HESE autumn Saturdays, usual- ly just about when we have fin- ished lunch, as I stand in front of the south wIndow in the kitchen scraping the dishes over the sink, I will hear a rapid drumbeat, and the sound of martial music is carried to me on the soft November air. It is the Univer- sity of Virginia band, marching to Scott Stadium for the football game. Most of the tunes it plays are familiar to me. As I wash the plates and cups I stat t to sing along with them, only the words I sing are often not the same as the words they are singIng to the music over there. My husband, who is a professor, takes the reasonable attitude that since he went conscientiously to every football game Brown played when he was an undergraduate, every game Harvard played when he was working for his doctorate, every game Princeton played w hen he started out as a young instruc- tor until the day it was revealed unto him that football is a dull game that he cares nothing about, he need never waste another Saturday afternoon. My own ardor, as I continue to sing to the stirring, faraway music of the band, has little to do with football as a sport I, too, went to every game you are interested," he added coldly. "I know," I said. "But I'm singing Grandpa's words" "You couldn't be! He couldn't have sung that," he insisted so feverishly that I felt I had better get to the botton1 of what it ,vas he thought I was singing. There proved to have been a mistake. He thought I had sung "Butt the line for Harvard," and, familiar with my ignorance of the most elementary rules governing sports, feared that I was con- fusing football and soccer. My father, a highly original man, had his own version of most things. He had managed to be the only male in several generations of his family-and among several brothers-who did not go to Harvard. After passing its en- trance examinations he departed for Paris, where he studied painting for sev- eral years, in the eighties and nineties, at Julian's and the Beaux-Arts. On re- turning to Boston he plunged into a ca- reer entirely devoted to the practice, teaching, and critIcism of art. But he was not content to rest upon these atypical laurels. Instead, he became the most ardent Harvard rooter In all his family. He went to its games, read Its news, upheld its name, to an extent that the other brothers still living- an archItect, a professor of English, and a railroad man-never dreamed of. Perhaps, by going there, they had got Harvard out of theIr sys- tems. My father never got Harvard out of his system. I remem- ber, as a child, hearing him say about a boy cousin of mine whose family sent him to Yale, "That was a damned silly thing to do. "'Thy should anybody send a son to a little place like Yale or Princeton when there is Harvard? " My childhood, in the en virons of Boston, was for some reason over- laid by a haze of melan- choly. The suburban streets, deep in russet leaves I scuffed through on my way home from school; the country road behind our house ( covered with white stones that at an earlier, happier stage I had be- lieved to be dragon's teeth) , up which I wandered to lonely, autumnal woods; our Harvard played-during the five or six years when I was, first, a Boston sub- débutante, then a débutante, then what used to be called L.O.P.H. ("Left on Poppa's Hands"), yet in all that time I never became absolutely certain what a first down was. My feelings about football games, which are deep, go far back into my childhood to the day when my father and my Uncle Edward took me to see my first, a Y ale- Harvard game in the Harvard Stadium. Harvard won the game-at the time this did not surprise me-and today I can remember all the words of all the songs we sang that cold November day; which is why I am able, after all these years, to sing Harvard's words to the tunes the Virginia band is playing, while over at Scott Stadium they are singing other verSIons But I don't quite sing Harvard's words, either. The way I begin one of the songs is "Buck the line for Harvard, F or Harvard wins today . . ." When my younger son, who is a Harvard junior, overheard me at this once, he exclaimed "Mother!" in tones of the deepest outrage, embarrassment, and disgust. "The actual words are 'Hit the line for Harvard,' in case NOVEMDER O, 1957 - --- --- ------ , .... Kf) V / "Talk about passing the buck!" " ,